


Surprise!!

by thirtymillionquid



Category: BBC Sherlock
Genre: Character Death, Established Relationship, HLV, M/M, Pre-TRF, post-TRF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:14:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3134105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirtymillionquid/pseuds/thirtymillionquid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out of all the places he's found Jim Moriarty before, he never expected to see him like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprise!!

It was an odd place to see him.

Sherlock had never expected to see Jim Moriarty like this.

He’d walked in on Jim Moriarty sitting comfortably in his chair, tapping away at his phone, and even taking apart his television remote once, complaining that the GUIDE button only worked if you pressed it down really hard.

Sherlock had walked in on Jim asleep on his couch, clutching a pillow like it was the detective himself. He’d found him with one of the biggest bruises he’d ever seen on the side of his face, but was still sleeping peacefully. When Sherlock had asked about it, he said that he ‘had to get his hands dirty’ every once and a while.

Sherlock remembered finding him crawling in through John’s window once to tell him the best of news, which included a deal that he had made that would give him a reason to visit Sofia, Bulgaria. He had been smiling like a child, a callous and cynical child but still, smiling. It disappeared when Sherlock said he couldn’t go with him, but Jim hardly ever let anything spoil his mood. He’d grabbed Sherlock’s waist and kissed him for the longest thirty seconds of Sherlock’s life before he had abruptly left.

Sherlock walked in on him reading through one of his scientific journals at the kitchen table, feet propped up comfortably with a red syrup stained Popsicle stick in between his teeth. He even made some of his own corrections, drawn little doodles of what the detective assumed was supposed to be him in a biohazard suit.

He’d woken up with Jim’s arms around his waist when he didn’t remember falling asleep next to him the night before. He’d never complained, of course, since his bed always seemed more comfortable with Jim’s weight on it as well. It made it feel inhabited, and not entirely empty.

Sherlock once saw Jim chewing gum while playing chess with an old man in the park, sunglasses covering his eyes and a black ‘I Heart NYC’ hat backwards on his head. When he saw Sherlock, he cut the game short and took every bit of his disguise off, telling him that he’d never want to kiss Sherlock as anyone other than Jim Moriarty.

Out of all those times, he’d never expected to see Jim here, eyes wide open and a half pleased smile on his face, blood pouring out of his head on the rooftop, trailing its way down as if it was heading towards the door, prepared to leave even if Jim wasn’t going with it.

He’d never expected to see Jim Moriarty like this.

Sherlock would never let it be said that Jim Moriarty was not a romantic at heart, even if he had to admit it underneath his breath, into a pillow so that no one else would hear it except for him. He would hear it, and he would know. Jim had loved Sherlock, even if neither of them had ever felt what true love was before in their life times, even with the worst of examples to go off of, they still knew. It was the greatest decipher that Sherlock had ever made, finally deciding why Jim Moriarty looked at him the way that he did.

Sherlock complained on several occasions about the criminal’s recklessness, but Jim knew that Sherlock loved the surprises. He loved finding him in places that he did not belong, finding him in places that could get the both of them in a lot of trouble.

But he didn’t love this. He would never love seeing him lifeless on the concrete, smug and still. He could practically see the stages of a dead body decomposing ten times faster that it should’ve been, but instead of seeing Jim’s faultless physical form rot, he was watching his soul deteriorate inside his eyes, crumbling down like a child withered away in poverty.

One of the things he remembered most about it was not being unable to cry until he was about to fake his death. He had to cry to John, he had to apologize to the wrong man.

Jim told him he wasn’t a very good crier, and they argued about now Jim had never seen Sherlock cry for real before. Jim just giggled in the delicate, delightful way that he always did before saying, ‘I will, someday.’

Seeing traces of Jim everywhere in the web that he was forced to dismantle made him proud. Like an artist who hid his initials or face in a painting, Jim left pieces of himself everywhere in every client, every piece of fabric in this long, continuous web somehow had a stitch of Jim Moriarty in there somewhere. Sherlock collected them like a child collected marbles, but he couldn’t keep them in a leather pouch or in his pockets. He could only be thankful that he was not one to forget anything that he saw.

Returning to London was like visiting one of his old crime scenes. Like a dream that you weren’t suppose to remember but eventually had a faint reliving of a moment that didn’t happen. Regular people called it De Ja Vu. Sherlock had the actual scientific term written down in the third to last book inside the second biggest library that was in his mind palace.

It was hard to fall back into routine when there was nothing waiting for you when you came back, no matter how effortless you could make it seem. Even if Sherlock had clients, they weren’t Jim’s clients. It almost felt like he was insulting Jim, but it was this or consuming himself with enough drugs to put him into a coma, and he swore to Jim that he’d never touch that ‘poison’ again. That was, until it became necessary.

Magnussen could dream, but he would never live up to the expectations that Jim Moriarty had left behind. He was boring, but Sherlock admired the effort. He admired every mistake that Magnussen made, he admired the mistakes that Magnussen could make him trip into. But it only made a deep, empty feeling carve its way into his stomach when he would think about Jim rolling over in his grave at every thing Sherlock said to ruin his honor.  
'No one can turn my stomach like Charles Augustus Magnussen.'

It seemed appropriate to put a bullet into Magnussen’s head. It felt justified, it felt like every single piece of the man that reminded him of someone who used to exhale the same words against his skin was falling down at Sherlock’s feet, sinking into the ground and burying themselves away. Because this way, Sherlock could die too, and he could die leaving this world as a fake hero, just as Jim convinced everyone else that he wanted to.

But the world wasn’t kind enough. In a past life, maybe if he hadn’t stepped on that bug or remembered to drop a coin in a poor man’s mug, things would go his way, and Mycroft wouldn’t have hesitated to let his men put a bullet into his brain too. Or maybe his brother knew, and he wouldn’t give Sherlock the satisfaction.

It was an odd place to find him in, too. Out of all the places Sherlock had found Jim in, he never expected to find him like this. Face plastered onto every screen in England, chin moving up and down the animated photo over and over, as if he was laughing at the world for how stupid they had been. It was as if he was laughing at Sherlock, too, for not seeing his theatrics, for truly believing that he would leave him here, all alone.

When he walked back into his flat to find Jim Moriarty seated comfortably on top of a cleared space on his kitchen table, feet crossed Indian style and a journal in his hands, he tiredly dropped his scarf and jacket like he had done all those times, sighing at the criminal’s recklessness.

Jim paused reading the journal for a few moments, eyes finding Sherlock’s and lighting up, unable to contain their excitement no matter how hard he had tried. Jim snapped the leather bound book shut and raised his eyebrows at the detective, grinning as if he was about to settle a deal to go to Sofia.

"Surprise."


End file.
